€13m Fortina ‘fraud’: Ex-OPM and Lands chiefs face criminal report as Malta’s coast war deepens

**Criminal report filed against ex-OPM, Lands chiefs on €13m Fortina case ‘fraud’**

A criminal complaint has been lodged with Malta’s police commissioner accusing two former senior public officials of fraud, misappropriation and criminal conspiracy over the controversial €13 million expropriation of the Fortina Hotel’s seafront footprint in 2018.

The report, signed by Repubblika president Robert Aquilina and filed on Tuesday, targets ex-Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) chief of staff Keith Schembri and former Lands Authority chief James Piscopo. It alleges the pair engineered an “artificially inflated” payout to Fortina investors – including prominent businessmen and donors to the Labour Party – using taxpayers’ money to buy back public land that was never legally forfeited in the first place.

For many Maltese, the Fortina promenade is more than a picturesque walkway in Sliema; it is part of the island’s collective birthright, a stretch where grandparents played brìskula on concrete tables and teenagers still gather for late-night ħobż biż-żejt after a swim. Watching successive governments slice and dice the coast for private gain has become a national sore point, and the Fortina deal has struck a particularly raw nerve.

“The coast is our living room,” says Sliema resident and pensioner Doris Micallef, who has walked the promenade every morning since 1974. “We feel it in our bones when a hotel suddenly puts up ropes and tells us we can’t sit on ‘their’ rocks.”

According to the complaint, Schembri and Piscopo pressed the Lands Authority to treat a 1950s temporary concession to the hotel as a permanent transfer, allowing the owners to claim compensation for its “return”. The €13 million price tag was based on a valuation commissioned by the buyers themselves, Repubblika alleges, and was rubber-stamped by cabinet in a single meeting with no call for competing appraisals. Within months, the same investors flipped part of the reclaimed seabed to a luxury yacht-marina developer for a sum widely reported to be double the public payout.

The timing is politically incendiary. Malta is still reeling from the Daphne Caruana Galizia public inquiry’s finding that “the culture of impunity” at the heart of government enabled her 2017 assassination. Fresh graffiti reading “Iż-żejda tagħna” (“The coast is ours”) appeared on the Fortina sea wall last weekend, echoing the protest slogans that once plastered Valletta’s baroque facades during the 2019 constitutional crisis.

Tourism stakeholders fear reputational fallout. “We market Malta as an open, sun-kissed playground,” says one veteran hotelier who asked not to be named. “When BBC and Le Monde pick up another corruption story, the damage is instant. Bookings drop, influencers cancel, and we’re left discounting rooms in August.”

The Fortina case also crystallises a deeper generational divide. Older Maltese recall when the shoreline was commons, punctuated only by the occasional boathouse. Millennials grew up with KPIs and public-private partnerships, accustomed to seeing coast turned into revenue streams – lidos, beach clubs, VIP sun-loungers rented by the hour. Yet even digitally native voters balk at what they call “the double insult”: first losing physical space, then footing the bill for the privilege.

Repubblika’s move pressures Police Commissioner Angelo Gafà to either charge or effectively clear the former officials, a litmus test for Malta’s anti-corruption pledges to the European Commission. Successive Moneyval reports have flagged the island’s abysmal record on prosecuting politically exposed persons; no senior figure has been convicted of graft since EU accession in 2004.

In the narrow alleys of nearby St Julian’s, opinion is split. “Let them investigate, but I’ll believe it when I see handcuffs,” shrugs 28-year-old barman Luke Camilleri, voicing a cynicism that has become the Maltese default. Yet even cynics admit the complaint keeps the spotlight burning. “At least the story isn’t buried under some new paving slab,” Camilleri adds. “That’s already a win.”

As the magisterial inquiry grinds into motion, families will keep pushing prams along the contested promenade, the sea glinting like polished glass. Whether that view remains legally theirs – or slips once more into private ledgers – now rests on a single police file and the fragile hope that, this time, the law may actually look like justice.